Lifelong Learning
by alexjolie
Summary: The Doctor arrives in a school where all is not what it seems. It was written in 2001/2002 and predates the revival series by 3-4 years and was written with the Fifth Doctor in mind - but it could be any. Summary needs work, content probably does too.


Lifelong Learning

An Adventure in Time and Space

The Latin master was once again absent throughout the entire period, so Abney had the opportunity to visit the school library to do some research of his own; and it was here that the first peculiar incident took place.

The library was an immense echoing cathedral of a room, with ancient hard-backed tomes crowding the oak bookcases that spanned floor to ceiling on every side. Dust had sifted steadily from the higher shelves to the lower; so that the shelf Abney wanted – the one containing the texts on existentialism – was filthy with the grime of centuries. Each volume he consulted creaked in his small hands, as if ready to disintegrate at the handling.

The boy felt a sense of awe, as he had so often before, at the extent of the library. Emerging from one labyrinth of bookcases, one simply entered another, and then another. There was rarely any difficulty in locating the exit, but there appeared to be no limit to the distance one could walk from it. Abney's deepest excursion into the library had taken him six hours: a little under three hours on the outward trip, a little over three heading back towards the exit. His favourite book, a transcription of J. M. Barrie's play _Peter Pan_, had once taken him many hours to find, despite the fact that the library was known to possess multiple copies of it, and to store them under a wide range of thematic categories.

It was while Abney was thoughtfully consulting a dusty copy of Sartre's _Huis Clos_ that he became aware that he was not alone in the library. Someone had crept in surreptitiously to join him, making small breathy sounds. Turning around, he was alarmed to see that the visitor was not one of his classmates.

"Let me help you, boy." The visitor said. Abney's shrieks made the bookshelves around him tremble, releasing plumes of grey dust into the air. Then the peculiar incident occurred.

Much later, the other boys, led by Parkins, thoroughly investigated the part of the library where Abney had been working. Every surface within fifteen feet of the spot where he had been standing was smeared with some part of the boy. Through careful inspection, however, the boys ascertained that there was enough organic material present to constitute a whole body, so they were able to conclude that cannibalism had not been the motive for the at tack. Abney's visitor, it appeared, had appetites of another kind.

The second peculiar incident took place in the mundane setting of the boys' lavatory, located somewhere along a corridor in one of the science areas. The chemistry master being once again absent throughout the entire period, Haynes Junior had taken himself off to the toilet, and was washing his hands in freezing water in one of the chipped porcelain washbasins. Absent-mindedly watching his breath forming clouds in the cold air, he realised that something was amiss; but for some minutes he was unable to determine what it was.

Finally he deduced what was wrong. Of the eight toilet cubicles lining one wall of the room, seven had their doors standing open as usual, but the eighth - the one farthest from the exit - was apparently occupied. Yet Haynes had been in the lavatory for some minutes, and had heard no sound from the cubicle, so had naturally assumed he was alone.

He suspected that he should simply leave, but something about the enigmatic closed door of that last cubicle compelled him to stay. Holding his breath, he made his way steadily across the tiled floor towards it. Still no sound came from inside, did the occupant know he was here? Was he, like Haynes, keeping silent, for some reason of his own?

Very slowly, Haynes got down onto his knees to peer beneath the cubicle door. Two dark, dirty-looking shoes could be seen through the fifteen-centimetre gap beneath it. The shoes were unmoving. The boy slowly straightened up again, listening to his heartbeat, hoping it could not be heard outside his body. He gingerly reached out a hand to push against the cubicle door.

For Haynes, time seemed to slow down. He watched his own hand, palm open, moving through the air towards the cubicle door. It seemed to him that the movement took forever, as if he were pushing his palm through layers of treacle. Then, when his hand was within an inch of touching it, the door was pulled abruptly inwards, and he saw what was seated inside.

Later, there was another grim scene for Parkins and the other boys to discover. All eight cubicles, the porcelain washbasins, the fly-spotted mirrors, the tiled floor, the grimy walls, the cracked ceiling, were splattered with the boy's remains. Not the tiniest part of Haynes, Junior had escaped the visitor's attentions. It might have been thought that a bomb had detonated inside his body. Little was left that would even have appeared human on casual inspection.

The third peculiar incident occurred in the school gymnasium: specifically, in one of its various gymnasia, for there was more than one, and no one could say for sure how many. The mathematics master was once again absent throughout the entire period, so Karswell and Humphreys decided they would go and take some vigorous exercise as a welcome alternative to their endless studies.

The gymnasium was disconcertingly vast, but over the years the boys had grown used to it. It no longer occurred to them as strange that it was impossible to see from one end of it to the other with the unaided eye. It now seemed only natural that it should possess not one but hundreds of vaulting horses, not just a few but thousands - perhaps hundreds of thousands - of assorted barbells and dumbbells. Who knows what demand there might be for exercise apparatus in a sizeable boys' school? The gymnasium was dark, too; one would have said it was candlelit, had there been any candles in view; and the shadows stirred endlessly, dark shapes on dark wood.

Karswell was climbing a rope, while Humphreys observed his progress. It was a feat of both daring and endurance, since the rope extended into the nebulous upper shadows of the gymnasium until it was lost from view. The rope had to be attached to the ceiling in some way, but the ceiling (this had also come to be accepted without question) could not be seen, so that the rope might just as well have been hovering and swaying under the supernatural influence of an Asian mystic. Heedless of this, Karswell continued his climb.

As Humphreys lost sight of Karswell in the dark upper reaches of the gymnasium, he started to feel anxious. The ascending boy's grunts of exertion faded into silence; Humphreys hoped his friend had left himself enough energy to get safely back down. There was a pause, lengthening until Humphreys's anxiety began to turn to fear.

"Is all well up there?" he called. His accent was all elegant Received Pronunciation, "Karswell?"

Humphreys strained his ears to catch any reply his friend might make. What he eventually heard - or rather felt, as a minute vibration in his inner ear - was an infinitely distant cracking sound, reaching him from somewhere high, high above his head, from somewhere amidst the dark sky of the ceiling.

A sudden terrible certainty gripped Humphreys, a flash of insight of a kind he had recently been experiencing more and more often: somehow, someone was up there with Karswell. Someone who dwelt in the upper reaches of the immense gymnasium, uncurling to greet the boy as he ascended into the dark.

Humphreys managed to comfort himself: the distant cracking sound had been ambiguous, perhaps even a product of his imagination; there had been no cry of distress; Karswell was perfectly capable of looking after himself; his own fears were irrational.

Now there was movement above, dangerously fast. For a sickening moment Humphreys was sure that Karswell was tumbling back down towards him. He strained his eyes upwards into the gloom. But what fell back down the length of the rope, drenching Humphreys from head to foot, was not Karswell at all, but a shower of tiny human fragments.

Humphreys was discovered later by Parkins and his other classmates, physically unharmed, but in a state of psychological disarray that promised to be permanent.

The schoolroom was steeped in slowly moving shadow. Darkness flowed up and down the wood-panelled walls, in and out of the inkwells of the battered wooden desks. On the ancient blackboard, carefully chalked in block capitals, was the message:

Dr Sampson is unfortunately unable to be present for today's physics lesson, due to unforeseen circumstances. Please continue making preliminary notes foryour essay entitled "_Economy, compatibility and plausibility in quantum mechanical formalism_."

Presently, a most incongruous sound welled up from nowhere to banish the silence of the schoolroom: a ghostly suggestion of the twiddle and bleep of electronic systems, more and more deeply submerged beneath a rhythmic grinding scrape. As the grinding swelled to a bellowing crescendo, the air flushed dark blue and resolved itself into a standing cuboid, solidity flooding through it. With a terminal crunch the noise ceased, and the object stood imposingly a few feet in front of the blackboard, obscuring the chalked message.

Perhaps the young-looking blond man who emerged cautiously from the box appeared less incongruous in the schoolroom than his vehicle. With his long fawn coat, neatly edged with red trim, his cream pullover and his striped trousers, he might well have been no stranger to academia, certainly not to a cricket pitch.

The man watched curiously as a line of a dozen uniformed schoolboys filed dutifully into the classroom from the corridor outside. Wood scraped noisily on wood as the boys took their seats, each before his own desk. Some of the seats, the man observed, were empty.

For a long time there was an uncomfortable silence. Finally one of the boys asked courteously: "Excuse me, sir. Are you the physics master?"

The man was gazing thoughtfully around the classroom; taking in each of the expectant young faces in turn. Each of the boys appeared to be aged about twelve or thirteen. "I'm afraid not," he replied carefully, as if anxious not to disappoint. "I'm a - Doctor."

"Excuse me, sir?" asked another of the boys. "Has the physics master perhaps been detained?"

Peering around the gloomy classroom, the Doctor now noticed the message chalked on the blackboard. "It appears he has. I'm sorry you've been dragged here for no reason."

"Don't worry, sir," a third boy said kindly. "It happens a good deal, as far as I can recall. And I'm quite sure he will have left plenty of work for us to get on with in his absence."

"Yes," the Doctor confirmed, still reading the chalked message, "Yes, naturally."

"You could perhaps give us a little test, sir?" asked a fourth boy, a pleasant-looking lad with an untidy tangle of red hair. A chorus of enthusiastic approval from the others followed his suggestion.

"What's your name?" the Doctor asked the boy.

The boy answered without hesitation, "Dennistoun, sir."

For a moment the Doctor appeared nonplussed. Then with a sudden burst of inspiration, he exclaimed: "Physics! Very well, Mister Dennistoun - explain quantum field theory."

"Sir, it's an inclusive theory of interactions between fundamental particles, with each type of particle represented by appropriate operators that obey the laws of commutation. The particles are the quanta of fields in just the same way as photons are the quanta of the electromagnetic field."

The Doctor gazed into the boy's eyes for a few moments. Then he turned to another of the classmates. "What's _your_ name?"

The boy stood so quickly the Doctor thought him on a parade ground, "Anstruther, sir."

"Very well, Mister Anstruther, define '_entropy'_."

"Sir, it's a term in classical thermodynamics: a measure of the extent to which the energy in a system is available for conversion to work. Statistical mechanics interprets the increase in entropy in a closed system to a maximum at equilibrium as the consequence of the trend from a less probable state to a more probable one. Consequently, the predicted heat death of the universe -"

"Thank you, Mister Anstruther." The Doctor turned to another of the boys, this one bespectacled, his left cheek riddled with acne, "And _your_ name?"

Again a boy got to his feet, not quite as sharply as the others but with deference to the Doctor's authority, "Poynter, sir."

"Mister Poynter. What can you tell," the Doctor waved a hand, "the rest of the class about neutron spectroscopy?"

"Sir, neutron spectroscopy is an experimental determination of the intensity and change in wavelength of the neutrons particular direction when a beam of monoenergetic particle on a crystal. It's an obsolete method for studying lattice vibrations."

"Obsolete?"

The boy did not even blink, "Yes, sir."

After a long and thoughtful pause, the Doctor addressed another of the boys, a handsome but anxious-looking lad with curly hair and dark green eyes, "And _your_ name?"

"Parkins, sir"

"Mister Parkins, what is the year?"

"Sir, it's a measure of time corresponding to one complete revolution of a planet around its parent star."

"No, Mister Parkins," said the Doctor patiently "What year is it _now_?"

Parkins faltered. "The same year it's always been, sir I mean…" His voice trailed off in confusion.

"Can _anyone_ tell me what year it is now?"

There was a long silence. The boys began glancing uncertainly at each other, and then back at the Doctor.

"Abney was the real specialist in metaphysics, sir," somebody offered finally. "But I'm afraid he's dead."

It was one of the most cordial receptions the Doctor had received in some time; the boys made him most welcome. They shared sandwiches and orange juice with him in the school's refectory although they had to admit, with some embarrassment, that they did not know where these refreshments came from. Food and drink were always in ready supply in the refectory, yet to the best of the boys' recollection, no kitchen staff had ever been seen.

"Tell me, boys," the Doctor said cautiously, "have you noticed strange about your school?"

Again the boys exchanged uncertain glances; it was Parkins who broke the silence, "Strange?"

"There are all the usual amenities, sir," said a skinny boy called Dillet, rather defensively "The laboratories are extremely well equipped, and the library contains every work imaginable."

The Doctor sipped his orange juice. "That's a lot of books," he observed, mainly to himself, "a _lot_ of books…"

"_Every_ work imaginable," Dillet emphasised.

"I imagine the playing fields are quite splendid," said the Doctor cheerily. 'Do you like cricket?"

"I've read a great deal about cricket," Poynter commented eagerly. '

"But have you _played_ it?"

"Played it where, sir?" Poynter asked.

The Doctor was staring curiously into the boy's eyes. He now discerned for the first time that something was wrong with them, but could not for the moment place what it was.

"The playing fields, Mister Poynter," the Doctor said, "Outside."

"Out…side?" questioned Poynter slowly.

"I've discovered something rather odd," said the Doctor. "I should share it with you. Consider it a physics problem."

The boys waited eagerly for this new test of their knowledge.

"It's just this," said the Doctor. 'My, er, vehicle performed a routine environmental assessment on landing. She - it - surveyed the architecture of the building we're in."

"Really, sir?" asked a chubby boy named Paxton with polite interest.

"Yes. And unusually – how can I put this – my vehicle was unable to determine the size of the building. It doesn't appear to have a perimeter. Which I thought was a curious paradox, especially since I've been able to rule out instrument malfunction."

The boys looked bemused.

The Doctor took a bite of his sandwich; it was delicious. "Let me ask you something else," he said. "When was the last time one of your teachers actually turned up for a class?"

This seemed to strike a chord for some of the boys. "It's a curious thing, sir," said Dennistoun. "I know the Latin master has been absent a great deal recently – and the geography master – and the art master. In fact -" His eyes narrowed. "Do you know, sir? At this precise moment I can't actually recall a single lesson that _any_ master has been able to attend. I try to think back, but before a few days ago, it just seems a blur."

Some of the other boys were nodding vigorously, in sympathy with Dennistoun. But Parkins was just watching Dennistoun thoughtfully.

"We work hard, sir," said Anstruther. "We study endlessly, by ourselves. But I'm not sure about teachers. We wait for them, but..."

"But they never come?" asked the Doctor, "Never?"

"But that's ridiculous!" Poynter exclaimed.

"Yes, isn't it?" mused the Doctor.

"Be that as it may," said Parkins, "We have got bigger problems."

And he told the Doctor about Abney, and about Haynes Junior, and about Karswell. When he had finished his account, the other boys looked pale with fright and disgust at the memories it had revived.

"How many of you are there in this school?" asked the Doctor, "After these three deaths?"

"This is everyone," said Parkins, gesturing around the group. "I mean, all except Chiddock. He was here with us a while ago. I'm not sure where he is now."

In normal circumstances the Doctor would have asked why such a vast school was necessary to accommodate a dozen or so boys, but he and the boys now recognised that Chiddock's unexplained absence represented a more urgent priority. An atmosphere of foreboding enveloped the group.

"He'll still be here in the refectory,' said Poynter. "It's – large. He won't have left it."

The Doctor and the boys rose from their chairs. The refectory was it appeared, L-shaped. They moved around the comer of the room into the adjoining area. There was no sign of the missing boy, just more tables and chairs, and another corner, with the promise of even more seating space beyond it. The Doctor experienced a curious sensation that he was losing his bearings; what _was_ the shape of the room?

The group were making their way cautiously through a third identical seating area when they heard Chiddock's high-pitched scream. What most sickened the boys was their own lack of surprise; the scream, they now realised, had been inevitable.

"Quickly!" the Doctor cried. He and the boys ran, until at last they found, in yet another section of the refectory, the remains of young Chiddock. For the boys, it was one more surreal nightmare, an unrestrained study in red paint. For the Doctor, it was one more boy he had failed to save: strangers or friends, the guilt was the same.

"He's everywhere," breathed Dennistoun, meaning Chiddock.

The Doctor was breathing hard. He looked at Parkins. "I need to speak to you," he said.

"I've seen many things," the Doctor told Parkins in the prefects' room. "But I've never seen anything quite like this. I must have your help if I'm to understand what's going on here."

For a while Parkins said nothing, his dark green eyes gazing into empty space. "I like to make up stories, Doctor," he said at last, "Something to do, to while away all those endless lessons with no teacher. Perhaps you'd like to hear my best story?"

"Yes," the Doctor said, "Very much."

"The way I view it, Doctor, with over ten to the twenty-two planets in this universe alone, every conceivable situation is certain to arise at least once. Wouldn't you say?"

"Go on."

"You'll like my premise, Doctor. At least I hope so. Imagine a culture that's very advanced. I mean really, _really_ advanced. They have all the usual technologies, of course: genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, faster-than-light travel and extraplanetary colonies – the standard things. And then imagine them a thousand years further on, and then _another_ thousand years beyond that approaching the asymptotic ceiling for scientific and cultural development. Are you picturing them, Doctor?"

"I am."

"Now imagine them after another _million_ years. All the above technologies have been improved further and then abandoned as primitive mysticism, superseded by technologies for which other cultures wouldn't even have words. But one thing still haunts this culture: the problem of evil. After a million generations honing their own cerebral perfection, they find they still have murderers, they _still_ have rapists and they _still_ have anarchists and terrorists and gang-lords. Built into their evolutionary heritage, you see. Their prehistoric ancestors were insatiably territorial, and so are they – in the deep ancient parts of their brains that the cerebrum has nothing to say about."

Parkins's voice was becoming hypnotic. The Doctor gazed steadily into the boy's eyes.

"What does this culture do about the problem of evil? Naturally, they have long ago abolished capital punishment as an archaic barbarism. But for a species with deep technological powers, there are alternatives. Let's suppose their psychometric testing is so acute that they can identify twenty, thirty, or forty years in advance who's going to grow up to be the most dangerous criminals. And suppose they can arrest the development of future criminals in childhood. Nothing as crude as a time loop: the children go on living, breathing, thinking, speaking. And they're intensely clever, like all the other children on their world. They just don't get any older. Ever..."

Parkins paused. He and the Doctor faced each other without words for a while, their three heartbeats pulsing quietly against the silence.

"Naturally, the authorities can't just leave these children to drift around society fixed eternally at the same age while their brothers and sisters, and their brothers' and sisters' children and grandchildren, get older and die. A special place for them has to be found, somewhere made just for children, where they'll feel at home. An environment where they can remain innocent for all eternity, and never grow up to do the vicious things they would have done. What do you suppose is the ideal place for highly intelligent children, Doctor?"

A long pause supervened. Finally, the Doctor asked: "How long have you been here, Mister Parkins?"

"I really don't know, Doctor. An unspeakably long time, I think. Maybe even longer, long enough to work out everything I've just told you, without a great deal to go on. I think this place has been in equilibrium for a very, very long time. That is until now."

The Doctor's brow furrowed, "Until my arrival?

"No, Doctor. I'm not naïve enough to blame you for the events that have been happening here, just because your arrival has happened to coincide with them. Although I imagine a traveller like you yourself gets quite a lot of that kind of thing."

The Doctor smiled. But behind his smile, he was already thinking hard. "I'm going to have a little look around," he said.

The Doctor moved through semi-darkness. It had taken him hours, all his psychic senses prickling, to track the visitor to a vast echoing chemistry lab, an unknowable distance from the schoolroom where the TARDIS had materialised. The room might have been an aircraft hangar, attached to another, attached to another, attached to another. The Doctor could not recall ever before having seen a room with a horizon. And to the horizon, the laboratory bristled with an apparent infinitude of test-tubes, glass jars, bowls, retorts, Bunsen burners – some of these lit – as far as the eye could see, and far, far beyond.

The Doctor swallowed. As he watched, something was emerging, with a curious stooping gait, from the nearer shadows of the lab. In the flickering light of the Bunsen burners, it resolved itself into a shambling humanoid shape, and then into the figure of a grotesque old man, clad in an ill-fitting brownish suit, its face hideously deformed by age. The Doctor imagined, with a sudden chill, what effect the sight of it must have had on young boys, _perpetually_ young boys, accustomed only to youth and vitality, forever and ever. Despite himself, he closed his eyes against its image.

But when the visitor said "Doctor", the sound of its voice was like the dry tearing of ancient paper, and the Doctor opened his eyes. The figure shambled forward. The Doctor recoiled with a surge of revulsion at the foetid smell of its baggy clothes.

"What do you want here?" he asked. "Why are you killing these children?"

In response to the question, the wrinkled face began to transform. Its contours writhed and stretched. The jaw-line distended, forced outwards by the pressure of lengthening teeth; the eyes turned yellow and the cheekbones folded back. "I've got reason," said the tearing-paper voice, emanating no longer from the creature's mouth but from deep inside its body. "I shall show you."

The figure advanced upon the Doctor, its body succumbing to progressively viler deformities. But even as it superficially relinquished its human shape, long talons extruding from every part of its stubby forelimbs to embrace the Doctor in the flickering yellow light of the lab, it remained somehow mundane and familiar, and for the Doctor that was the worst of it; for it was still not a monster, just a hideous, _repulsive_ old man.

Talons wrapped around the Doctor's shoulders, and obscenely extended jaws folded around his neck, but he received no bite. Instead he smelled the brown stink of its breath, and felt his mind abruptly flooded with images, unnaturally clear: of a vast structure, of a soaring technological wonderland, breaking apart in multiple explosions, visions of falling bodies, burning and whirling in the air, cries of panic and sobs of despair.

"See what should happen," breathed the creature. "Anguish beyond measure, three thousand souls up in – _smoke_." The last word was enunciated so sharply that it was accompanied by a spurt of foul liquid against the Doctor's cheek.

Then the creature unfurled its grasp, and the Doctor was free to watch it shuffle back into the farthest shadows of the laboratory.

"I've seen what it is," the Doctor told Parkins in the biology room. "And I believe I know what it's doing here."

"I don't understand why it didn't kill you," said Parkins.

"I witnessed an attack on a hydrogen plant," said the Doctor, "A terrorist strike. Thousands died in the fire and the explosions."

"Who's responsible?" breathed Parkins.

"That's the hard part, but I think you know the answer already. I don't think this atrocity actually happened. But it was _going_ to, which is rather the point."

Parkins slowly sat down onto one of the wooden benches in the lab, slowly covering his face with his hands.

"I think what's been killing your classmates is the corporeal expression of something that one of you _should_ have grown up to do, probably thousands of years ago, if you had been allowed." said the Doctor. "This event _knows_ it should have happened. No doubt it feels cheated of its existence by your society's novel penal system. And now it's trying to intrude into reality, and expressing its aggression in the only way it can."

"But why is it just _us_?" Parkins exclaimed. His usual composure had completely deserted him, and now there was only a child's petulant desperation in his voice. "Why didn't it kill you too?"

"It probably recognised that my mind would be a suitable vessel for its message," said the Doctor slowly, as if thinking aloud. "Despite all your intelligence, your race isn't psychic. Mine is. This thing wants you to know exactly why it's here."

Parkins nodded in vague comprehension, "Before it kills us all."

"Yes," said the Doctor gently. "I expect so."

"You've travelled through the universe, Doctor. Isn't that true?"

"Yes."

"And witnessed many creatures, many life forms?"

"Some, yes."

Parkins gazed straight into the Doctor's face. The Time Lord now realised that the boy's dark green eyes looked impossibly ancient.

"Can you help us to kill it, Doctor?" Parkins asked without preamble, without hesitation.

The Doctor stared back at him. Minutes passed, and more minutes. But above all else that he had studied, Parkins had learned patience.

At last the Doctor said: "There is a possibility. But there's a serious chance it won't work."

"Well, we have to -"

"And if it _doesn't_ work," continued the Doctor, "we'll have problems you haven't even dreamed of yet."

But somewhere in the dark and endless corridors of the school, an unwanted visitor was still moving, and breathing, and slavering. And both Parkins and the Doctor knew there was no longer a choice.

It was time to implement the Doctor's scheme. All the remaining boys were gathered with him in the prefects' room.

"Concentrate," said the Doctor to the assembled circle of schoolboys. "Your minds are filled with power. You've been honing your mental abilities in this place for thousands of years. It's time to use them."

The boys concentrated, each staring intently at the large circle that the Doctor had carefully chalked on the wooden floor. As they focused their minds, each of them contributed something different, as the Doctor had instructed: a unique gift from each boy, harvested from his own dark potential; from Poynter, serial rape on his home world; from Anstruther, genetic terrorism on Scavenius; from Wraxhall, gang warfare on Kory Prime; from Garrett, blood smuggling on Dispo and more, and more.

The boys' thoughts originated as flickering electrochemical impulses, dancing along the intricate neural pathways of their brains. But soon their thoughts extended beyond their skulls and out into the cold of the room, deftly reshaping the molecules of the air.

The boys watched as a shape began to form over the Doctor's chalk circle: a pool of cream-coloured light hovering in the humming air. The shape solidified, unfolding into an upright human skeleton, four feet tall. As the boys recognised their handiwork, their attention faltered; the outlines of the skeleton wavered, light refracting haphazardly around it.

"Concentrate!" urged the Doctor. "You have one chance. You must not lose it!"

The boys concentrated. Spurred on by this visual proof of their success, each one poured all his thoughts into the diminutive shape materialising in front of them.

Now the small skeleton was awash with blood. It poured out from nowhere, flooding over all the bones simultaneously, racing around the curvature of the ribs, over the arms, down the spinal column, over the pelvis and down the legs, flowing across every surface until no white bone was visible at all. Muscles sprang up in leathery red sheets, folding into place, wrapping themselves against the bones.

"Concentrate!" insisted the Doctor.

The boys concentrated. Ligaments snapped into position, crisscrossing tendons flickered into dark gaps and dragged muscle to bone. Organs bloomed pink and white behind the ribs. Clouds of grey fat puffed up around the thickening chest, the hips and the thighs. Eyeballs blossomed in the sockets, a pink tongue wriggled out between the sprouting teeth.

"Concentrate!" cried the Doctor.

The boys concentrated. Pale skin slid out over every surface, meeting and sealing; light brown hair fluttered up out of the scalp. Finally the small figure stood complete, a naked male child. Soon clothes that seeped out of the air to enfold it covered its nakedness: white shirt, black trousers and dark blue blazer. Even a school tie, identical to those of the other boys, looped itself around the slender neck. Its face was angelic, but not even the Doctor felt able to meet its gaze.

"Get out of here, boys," instructed the Doctor as the small figure began to stir in the chalk circle. "That concludes the lesson for today."

"Get ready," said the Doctor to the boys a few minutes later. They were standing in the main corridor that reputedly led from the senior common room to the drama hall. Here, the school's unnatural geometry became wholly apparent. It was a corridor that started ordinarily enough, with a wide polished wooden floor, elegant wood-panelled walls, and a high ceiling; but one dizzying glance at the vanishing point in either direction betrayed its infinite length. The Doctor recognised immediately that the architecture of the corridor did not permit for its having an end; for Parkins and the rest of the boys, it was as if the Doctor's company had lifted the veils from their eyes, and they saw now what had previously eluded them, that the structure of the school was quite, quite impossible.

Some metres along the length of the corridor, their new classmate was wandering, beginning to explore his infinite new world: the slight, frail figure of a uniformed schoolboy, fruit of the Doctor's ingenuity, composite of the boys' inner darkness. He was peering silently around at the walls, the floor and the ceiling, appearing lost, vulnerable and frightened.

Then, as the Doctor had predicted, another figure appeared: first as an infinitesimal point in the vanishing reaches of the corridor, far beyond the newly created figure, then swiftly growing, approaching. It resolved itself with unnatural speed into the shambling shape of a stooped and hideous old man.

The visitor was expert at sniffing out youth. The fresh smell of the newborn schoolboy, wandering aimlessly in the corridor, was intoxicating in its nostrils. The Doctor and the other boys watched breathlessly as it approached. Despite the Doctor's presence, the boys experienced a thrill of primordial terror. Their one bitter consolation was that it would reach their new classmate before it reached them.

"My _strong_ advice," said the Doctor, his voice high-pitched with anxiety, "is not to look."

No one obeyed. The sight of the approaching old man transfixed them as it finally relinquished any pretence to humanity. All its limbs were deforming at once. Everywhere claws were sprouting, sharp tusks unfolding, ribs were splitting through the grey skin and baggy old suit to extrude from the creature's body as a multitude of flexible stabbing weapons. The head became flattened and bestial, dominated by the mouth, a nest of jagged fangs leering with obscene appetite.

"Three thousand souls," the thing rasped; the sound of its voice made the boys whimper.

But the new boy seemed not to notice it, even after it spoke. Instead the small figure continued to wander in the corridor, never far from the same spot, oblivious to the approaching, slavering creature.

"Are you lost, boy?" the creature said, addressing the small figure. As the Doctor and the others watched, the creature closed the remaining distance between itself and the boy. One of its forelimbs flashed out, suddenly elastic, sprouting killing talons as it sped through the air. At the last possible moment, the small figure turned sharply to stare straight into the creature's eyes.

"I said _don't look_," said the Doctor more firmly.

His advice still went unheeded. Parkins and the others looked, as the little boy's eyes turned cold yellow, staring unwaveringly into those of the creature, which faltered in its tracks, for the first and only time. Impossibly, a sound that might have been a whine of fear issued from somewhere in the depths of the creature's throat.

The little boy just had time to flash an angelic smile into the creature's face before he too began to change, faster than the creature had done, and into something more hideous. The two entities struggled, embraced and intertwined in continuous fluid transformation; they struggled as opposing forests of snapping mouths.

For the onlookers, the battle was beyond belief and beyond bearing. The Doctor would have liked to extend some comfort to the boys; but as so often, his pragmatism had been all he had to offer.

As the critical point was reached, the two opposing entities fused into a single vast writhing organism, reeling and raging in the corridor. The physical strain of the battle was too much for it; it could not withstand the tidal forces of muscular pressure slamming and colliding within it; and it fractured and came apart in a roaring explosion of spraying blood, fragments of skin, splinters of bone, twirling shreds of organic material. The air was filled with a blizzard of flying pieces; the Doctor, Parkins and the other schoolboys were drenched in it.

After a long and sober silence, Parkins said quietly: "Thank you, Doctor." And the boy smiled up into the Doctor's eyes.

And that should have been all.

But after the customary grateful goodbyes, back in the TARDIS console room and a million million miles away; the Doctor was troubled by two thoughts that turned him cold, thoughts he could not share.

If all the boys' potential evil had been poured into the little boy that they had united to create, could it be that the boys themselves were now left sinless? That would be unthinkable, for then their eternal confinement would be without reason.

And worse, could the dark power of a potential future event be so simply destroyed? As the Doctor pictured the endless gloomy corridors of the school, its classrooms and its dormitories, its libraries and its laboratories and its creaking wooden furniture and the shadows that crept around them, it seemed impossible to imagine the place delivered from evil. How much more likely that somewhere in that infinite labyrinth, something cold and carnivorous would be taking shape again, dreaming of meeting schoolboys in the dark, while the boys themselves continued waiting patiently for lessons they would receive.


End file.
